Swoon is the first extensive study of literary swooning, homing in on swooning's rich history as well as its potential for opening up new ways of thinking about the contemporary.

Swoon shows that passing-out has had a pivotal place in English literature. Beginning with the lives of medieval saints and ending with a consideration of recent romance fiction, this study revisits key texts in literary history to reveal that swoons have been intimately connected to explorations of emotionality, ecstasy and transformation; to depictions of sickness and of dying; and to performances of gender and gendering. This literary history of swooning is therefore also a history of crux points for how we imagine the body, and for evolving ideas of physiology, (dis)ability, gender and sexuality. Swoon also argues that passing-out has long been used as a way to figure literary creation and aesthetic sensitivity: from the swoons of medieval mystics to contemporary literary-theoretical depictions of destabilised subjects, literary faints have offered a model of overwhelming, aesthetic, affective response.

This book offers an exciting new way to approach the history of the body alongside the history of literary response.